When writers ask me "Can you find me a literary agent?" they don't realize it's kind of like asking me "Can you find me the right spouse?" This is a research process and decision that's best conducted by you. I think you'll understand why by the end of this post.
Links of the week April 27 2015 (18)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
4 May 2015
Understand Your Work's Commercial Potential There are different levels of commercial viability: some books are "big" books, suitable for Big Five traditional publishers (e.g., Penguin, HarperCollins), while others are "quiet"2 books, suitable for mid-size and small presses. The most important thing to remember is that not every book is cut out to be published by a New York house, or even represented by an agent; most writers have a difficult time being honest with themselves about their work's potential. Here are some rules of thumb about what types of books are suitable for a Big Five traditional publisher: Genre or mainstream fiction, including romance, erotica, mystery/crime, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, young adult, new adult Nonfiction books that would get shelved in your average Barnes & Noble or independent bookstore - which requires a strong hook or concept and author platform. Usually a New York publisher won't sign a nonfiction book unless it anticipates selling 10,000 to 20,000 copies minimum.
Publishers need to focus on developing fans for books, not merely marketing them, argues Lance Fensterman, founder of ReedPop and producer of BookCon.
Last year's BookCon, which was held in conjunction with BookExpo AmericaBookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States "took 45 days to plan and we sold out at 10,000 people, This year we are capping it at 20,000 people. We are trying to introduce a model of end-to-end where authors are introduced to their fan base,"201D said Fensterman. "We had to guide publishers in content. We declined a number of marquee authors they wanted to bring because they didn't build this niche, passionate fan base we wanted to build. Don't undervalue this niche by dismissing it at genre. These are passionate consumers of content. We are not looking to engage the 45-55 year-old reader. How do you engage the YouTube generation? That's what we want to answer."
Sales of audiobooks have doubled in the last five years, thanks to the popularity of digital downloads and a host of famous faces signing up to read them, figured from the Publishers Association show.
Statistics gathered by the association show that British readers spent £10million of audiobooks last year, a 25 per cent rise from the amount invested in the genre in 2013.
In 2010, just £4million was spent on audiobooks, leaving publishers fearing readers would turn away from them forever.
Instead, the rise of mobile devices and tablets has led to ever-increasing downloads, thanks to the easy access to novels on the go.
The popularity of audiobooks is reflected, and in part caused, by the high-profile names signing up to narrate. The latest, actress Reese Witherspoon, will read the as-yet-unpublished Harper Lee novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
More than two dozen writers including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates and Lorrie Moore have joined a protest against a freedom of expression award for Charlie Hebdo, signing a letter taking issue with what they see as a "reward" for the magazine's controversial cartoons.
"There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression," the letter reads. "The magazine seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion. But in an unequal society, equal opportunity offense does not have an equal effect.
"Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire."
An eight-year-old who asked, "What if a girl wanted a pirate book?" has won a victory for equality, after children's publisher Scholastic stopped labelling books as "for girls" or "for boys".
Els, from Bounds Green school in London, decided to get in touch with the publisher after spotting the title, Amazing Things for Boys to Make and Do - "the Cap'n of pirate fun books. Pure gold" - in a catalogue for the Scholastic book fair coming to her school. She wrote a petition, arguing that no books should be "for girls" or "for boys". She asked, "What if a girl wanted a pirate book and it said 'For boys', she might say 'What's wrong with me, I like boys' stuff?" - and collected more than 80 signatures from friends, teachers and family members.
Els sent it to the publisher with the support of the campaign group Let Books Be Books, which also took Scholastic to task over an online tool for book recommendations. The 'book wizard' quizzes children on their interests and - until Friday - offered "very different questions, and different books to boys and girls", said the campaigners.
Here is the scenario: a society is considering a publishing services deal with Elsevier, Wiley, whomever. The society, having heard from the librarians at their institutions that the people who work for commercial publishers are Certifiably Bad Guys, is fearful that the large publishers will try to take over editorial control. Of course, the last thing a publisher like this wants to do is to muck around with editorial, as that is where the costs and headaches are.
Joe Esposito: Editorial independence is sometimes called by the more colorful name of the "church-and-state" principle. Editors rule the church, the state is run by the business types. This is an important principle in advertising-supported media where a publication may be pressured to go easy on an advertiser, but as anyone can see, if you do that once, you can't do it a second time, as it destroys the brand. In the world that Kitchen readers inhabit, the idea of business people interfering with editorial decisions is so outrageous that the situation almost never comes up. I can't imagine it myself.
27 April 2015
There is a "huge inequality" in earnings between writers, with a small number - 10% - earning most of the money made by professional authors, research released today (20th April) has found.
The Business of Being an Author: A Survey of Authors Earnings and Contracts was commissioned by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), with research carried out by Queen Mary University of London.
The bottom 50% of all writers - those who say they are professional writers as well as those for whom writing is not a primary occupation - earn only 7% of all the money earned by writers cumulatively.
Thus, it appears that writing is a profession where only a handful of successful authors make a very good living while most do not, said the report. The research revealed that 17% of all writers did not earn any money from writing during 2013, and that nearly 90% of writers need to earn money from sources other than writing
Imperceptible, invisible almost, but it was there at the London Book Fair this year-publishers quietly clapping each other on the back and breathing a collective sigh of relief: Phew, thank goodness that ebook thing is over. Now let's get back to real publishing.
I'm being a little facetious, of course. But this year's trade show did see a genuine departure from the maelstrom of anxiety and excitement over the rapidly developing digital market that has dominated the last few fairs.
Most publishers seem to believe the worst is now over, that the industry has survived an inconvenient tsunami warning that turned out to be nothing but an unseasonably high tide.
But is the industry blind to the coming tempest? I certainly believe so. The music industry thought that disruption was over by 2011 when their sales began to recover somewhat. Despite digital units accounting for 64% of music sales, the consensus was that the market had stabilized and was back to business as usual. Then in 2011 a Swedish start-up called Spotify launched in the U.S. After only four years in the mainstream, it now has over 15 million subscribers and 60 million active users. The Spotify business model has truly disrupted the music industry, with artists now looking at nontraditional ways of generating sales other than records as their staple income.
Open Road has published some 10,000 titles to date, and is currently producing around 2,500 a year. At LBF it has been excited to announce its Alan Sillitoe deal which will see it publish 24 of the celebrated British writer's backlist as ebooks, as well as the third volume of Sillitoe's "Start in Life" trilogy, the unpublished Moggerhanger, which it will publish in both print and digital.
Sillitoe was a seminal figure in his day, part of the gritty "angry young men" movement in 1950s Britain that was left-leaning and challenged the Establishment. Its fellow members included the playwright John Osborne and the novelist John Wain. Sillitoe rose to fame with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, both of which became classic black-and-white films.
From personalised cookbooks to co-publishing, the London Book Fair last week was awash with companies talking about their latest innovations. Many of these were reported in The Bookseller Daily but, in case you missed them, here's a round-up with some additional commentary as to why I think they are important.
What are the themes here? That content, when it is unlatched from one specific format, is helping re-wire book businesses and pushing them to re-imagine how they can do things. Book businesses are changing more radically than is sometimes reported.
Looking back, it helped that Paula Hawkins wrote The Girl on the Train with growing urgency and dread verging on panic - because that feeling seeped into her novel. The book, she says, "felt like the last roll of the dice" for her as a writer. It has been described as her debut - and it is her first under her real name - but in fact it is Hawkins's fifth novel. Writing under a pseudonym, she had been commissioned to produce romantic fiction. But they never really felt like "her", although you could see the way Hawkins was going. The first was quite lighthearted; by the fourth, they had got darker and darker. "The last one has loads of terrible things happening in it and ended up being rather tragic in a lot of ways," says Hawkins with a laugh. "Nobody bought it."
The Girl on the Train has had a dizzying rise, and among all the so-called domestic noir books that are now excitedly talked about as the new Gone Girls, it may be the closest thing. Or at least the sales are (in fact, it is outpacing Gillian Flynn's mega-seller). It has sold more than 120,000 copies in hardback since January, and sales of ebooks and copies in other countries are at around 2m. The US market has taken to it especially - the book has been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks, and the film rights have been bought by DreamWorks.
She must now be making an astonishing amount of money - more, she admits, than she ever thought she could make from writing. Has it changed her? "My life is exactly the same as it was before, although I'm aware that I'm more solvent," she says. "1'm going to have some things done to my house which have been desperately needed. I may move and get myself a bigger place, but I haven't gone crazy." Otherwise, nothing much has changed. Even successful writers are afforded anonymity, she points out, and nobody looks at us when we meet in a cafe near her home in south London, our conversation drowned out by the occasional passing police car.
We're going to go out on a limb here and make a sweeping prediction, one that hopefully will be ridiculed in fifty years: consumers do not buy books directly from the publisher. Why not? Because in most cases, they don't know who the publisher is. In even more dire news for publishers, consumers also don't care who the publisher is.
But when is the last time a reader opened a browser and Googled, "Horse books for tween girls, published by Random House?" Seriously. When has that ever happened? Instead, readers find books where they are, namely, in bookstores, whether those stores are real or virtual. A study presented at a publishing event by Goodreads' Otis Chandler actually demonstrated that readers largely discover books based on word of mouth or by finding them on display on retailers' shelves (even non-book retailers). So why are publishers so intent on developing websites that will engage readers, when readers don't even pay attention to who published the book?
The London Book Fair has evolved to reflect the "new ecology" of publishing and shift in confidence, says Faber's Stephen Page.
He went on to talk about how he feels "a new ecology" has emerged for the industry now. "The previous ecology got hammered and challenged. A new one has emerged that is partly around the resilience and return of physical books, partly around the new confidence there is. There is a new confidence about the options open to publishers, about the creation of value, about investing in content with confidence. There is a shift towards the consumer, which is still continuing and isn't finished yet, and just a new confidence about the tools and opportunities open to us."